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Having a stick-in-the-mud is not a valid reason to keep maintaining old software. If somebody needs/dependson an older version, they really should pick a different distro, not the one that really pushes the limits. Enterprise Linux, for example, has BOTH OpenJDK 1.6 **AND** 1.7 in default repos. Seems to me like a better option for anyone who "depends" on it.

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Having software depend on older versions of software is jut asking for trouble when it comes to taking advantage of vulnerabilities in software being so popular.

While true, that doesn't mean that upgrading is free or painless. Since it was released last week, I've tried upgrading our application to Java 8, but had to revert due to issues - a mix of techstack components (IDE, app server) not yet supporting Java 8, and some third-party library that was doing some kind of version check to enable or disable features (and which treated 8 as unrecognised and old).

All of those issues can be fixed with time and effort, but until they're fixed, Java 8 just isn't an option yet.

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It's not a question of what's in the repos - it's a matter of what the default is, what you get when you run "java" from a command line, or when you run Java-based applications from the desktop.

And for "enterprise" development (i.e at work), I don't use distro packages for Java anyway... I use specific versions downloaded off Oracle's site, and installed under /opt...

For what it's worth, the whole Java is obsolete on desktop. Legacy apps only use it. Mono starts up much faster and LLVM provides faster code gen. Also for browser JS is really good. So, Java is not really needed anymore.

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For what it's worth, the whole Java is obsolete on desktop. Legacy apps only use it. Mono starts up much faster and LLVM provides faster code gen. Also for browser JS is really good. So, Java is not really needed anymore.

mono is definitely not an option for ANY SANE person AT ALL.
java is somewhat related, but there are some major important packages that depend on it, like eclipse.